(I meant to do this at one month, but it turns out having a one-month-old leaves not a lot of time for blogging. So we’re starting at Month 2!)
Vital Statistics: Our little Emmett is not so little anymore! At your 2-month checkup, you weighed in at exactly 14 pounds, and measured 23″. Your doctor was MIGHTY impressed with your weight gain; they usually like for babies to double their weight by 6 months, and you did it in 2!
Dear Emmett,
I had a lot of expectations and assumptions going into this whole having-a-baby thing. You have pretty much shattered every single one.
-I expected it to take a long time for us to even conceive you, but once I got my issues straightened out, it took no time at all: it was the very first time I had ovulated in YEARS that I got pregnant.
-I never expected the roller coaster of pregnancy to be QUITE so crazy: from a few miscarriage scares in the first weeks to the craziness of appendicitis at week 10 to feeling the healthiest I’ve ever felt in my life, it was quite the ride.
In case you missed it:
Part 1: The version that wasn’t
Part 2: Leading up to the main event
Spoiler Alert! This blog post ends with a baby.
After being delayed twice, our “cowboy surgeon” decided we had been patient long enough. She arranged for us to be prepped and ready in a second OR while she was in the first OR finishing up a previous emergency C section. At this point she was getting used to my sense of humor, because she looked only slightly put out when I commented “Oh good, then you’ll have had some recent experience with the procedure before starting ours.” Yeah, she’s done thousands of these.
When we last left our heroes, we were spending the days leading up to Tuesday the 26th preparing ourselves mentally, emotionally, and culinarily for surgery, a baby, and recovery.
View from the car that morning
The story of Emmett’s birth actually starts a few weeks before he actually arrived. Starting around 30 weeks we were getting concerned that he was not flipping head-down, the way he was supposed to for a vaginal birth. As I documented here, we started to do a lot of different poses and tricks to try to get him to turn. When we got to 34 weeks and still had a heads-up baby, our midwives started to be concerned too, so we shifted our efforts into high gear. Chiropractor, acupuncture, moxibustion, hypnosis–you name it we tried it. In the final weeks we spent hours at the local community pool doing underwater handstands. (In a bikini, mind you, since that is all I had that fit. So you know I was serious about turning this baby.)
Moxibustion. Good times.
Emmett Douglas was born via scheduled c-section on March 26 at 2:26 pm. He weighed 7 pounds 3 ounces and measured 20.5 inches.
I am writing up his birth story, but it might take a while, so I wanted to just post a little placeholder here. (And no, that’s not my nipple in the picture above, it’s an ear. We verified by checking the photos we took before and after this one.)
Stay tuned for more on this little guy, and our new family of three!
Josh and I are skipping all the Valentine’s Day rigamarole this year. Usually we don’t do much anyway apart from a card and maybe a little gift, but this year we’ve got so much going on that we decided we’d order a romantic pizza. Done.
My favorite wedding photo, in honor of Valentine’s Day.
Part of that is we have a biweekly group prenatal session at the birth center today. These have been pretty great; we’ve learned all about breastfeeding, stages of labor, SIDS prevention, etc. Today’s is a little different; while the women will be doing bellycasting (a little hippy dippy for my tastes but I am going with the flow), the dads/partners go off and do something called “Partner Boot Camp,” where they learn to do things like change diapers and swaddle infants and all that. I imagine, knowing our birth center (which also a community health center), that they also get a pep talk about being there for their growing families, being a good partner, etc etc.
Posted in Pregnancy
